Fortress Around Your Heart

Today is my 700th post on Song of the Day for Today! Thanks for joining me here. Let’s celebrate with some music, shall we?

The English singer, songwriter, musician and actor Sting (aka Gordon Summer, b. 1951) is an artist I’ve admired since first hearing him as the lead singer and bassist of the post-punk, new wave band The Police, a gig that ran from 1977 until the band’s breakup in 1986.

Sting released his first solo record, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, in 1985, and today’s selection was its third single and closing track. While I’m familiar with his albums from the 1990s, I don’t know this album, but I remember “Fortress Around Your Heart” very well. The song came on random play this morning while my sweety and I were getting ready to leave for a grandchild-caring day. It reminded me of a conversation with friends last night, so it seemed fitting for today.

“Fortress Around Your Heart” has the same sharp, smart standard of writing, singing, playing, and bright production I recognize in Sting’s music. Two excellent albums from the ’90s come across to me as concept albums (please see my posts on songs from them): the first is the balladeering style of Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993), the title a play on Sting’s last name combined with The Canterbury Tales, the famous book by English author, poet and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400); the second is Mercury Falling (1996), an album in which he explores topics like loss, depression and acceptance. In a 1996 interview with Guitar World magazine, Sting said of Mercury Falling, “The new songs are full of seasonal ideas: that you might die in winter yet be born again in spring. That you can be broken and then mended. Even the title, ‘Mercury Falling,’ which was the first phrase that came to me when I started writing, keeps reverberating in new ways. I was very ‘mercurial’ in jumping around from genre to genre and mixing things on this album. And Mercury was the thief of the gods, so I stole from everywhere.”

On that record, he also explores complicated relationships, saying to Interview magazine, also in 1996: “I have to reflect my moods, my memories, my hopes, my anxieties, my nostalgia and love for whatever’s happening. That’s my brief to myself when I make an album – it’s a heartfelt expression of me. This is a hopeful record, and I’m proud of it. I’ve had enough loss and sadness in my life not to be autobiographical, even now. I know what it’s like to be heartbroken. Also, I think the universe is reflected in relationships and that you can tell a love story that expresses the whole of existence. And I find difficult relationships more interesting to write about. In general though, my work is less confessional than it used to be.”

Back to today’s selection, I believe it follows a similar theme around difficult or complex relationships; not only one’s relationship with another but also with the self.

[Verse 1]
“Under the ruins of a walled city
Crumbling towers and beams of yellow light
No flags of truce, no cries of pity
The siege guns had been pounding all through the night
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the fields I’d known
I recognized the walls that I’d once made
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I’d laid

[Chorus]
And if I built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire

[Verse 2]
Then I went off to fight some battle
That I’d invented inside my head
Away so long for years and years
You probably thought or even wished that I was dead
While the armies are all sleeping
Beneath the tattered flag we’d made
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I’d laid

[Chorus]
And if I built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire

[Verse 3]
This prison has now become your home
A sentence you seem prepared to pay
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the lands I’d known
I recognized the fields where I’d once played
I had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I’d laid

“Fortress Around Your Heart,” by Gordon Sumner.
Lyrics retrieved from Genius.com.

In my view, Sting is trying to make sense of an intimate relationship and struggling with the walls that can go up and isolate one another; the walls and city symbolize the components of the relationship. He speaks of this struggle toward the end of the first verse, with words he repeats in the subsequent verses: “It took a day to build the city / We walked through its streets in the afternoon / As I returned across the fields I’d known / I recognized the walls that I’d once made / I had to stop in my tracks for fear / Of walking on the mines I’d laid.” Here he also implies self-awareness about his role in all this; perhaps self-destructive words and actions (the land mines), things that undermine his own growth and healthy association, keeping him detached from an authentic relationship with himself and others. Hands up, everyone who’s been there!

In the video, a shady character seeks out and hires Sting to play a song for money, and there’s a film noir kind of quality to the scene. Sting is defiant toward the man’s toughness and dictates which song he’ll sing. And, of course, there’s a mysterious woman in the mix, but little is shown of or known about her. In the end, Sting takes the money and, in a final act of noncompliance, has a creative use for it, as you’ll see. It’s quite a clever premise for the video, and a statement on human interactions.

Now you know a little about why this is my Song of the Day for Today. Thanks for joining me here.

I hope you’ll enjoy the official music video from Sting’s YouTube channel (I’m not sure of the significance of “Option Two” in the title, as I didn’t see another official one on his channel):

With warm wishes,

Steve